Doing Archival Research in Political Science By Scott A. Frisch, ...

To take just one example, consider that one of the factors that is seemingly correlated with favorable impressions of incumbents and their reelection is favorable attention received by the media. When an incumbent fails to get favorable coverage, when coverage is lacking, or when challengers successfully garner media attention, this spells trouble for the incumbent and might signal his or her defeat. Often, incumbents blame the media for slanted coverage or inattention—holding them responsible. But this raises a question: Is it the media’s fault or the incumbent’s inability or unwillingness to seek that coverage? The easy way to test an incumbent’s relationship with the media is to search Lexis-Nexis Academic for all of the articles about the incumbent in a state’s newspaper (if that newspaper happens to be in Lexis-Nexis). The hard, but better, way is to analyze the member’s own efforts to obtain coverage by reviewing the press releases the member chose to send out. That will help one understand how the member wanted to be portrayed and can quickly reveal whether the media did indeed slight or negatively portray the incumbent. Did the member send out many press releases, only to be ignored by the press, or—more likely—did the incumbent have a poorly planned media strategy which simply did not attract much media attention? The data located in archives frequently provide better information to analyze political questions than do much of the easy data one can download with a click of the mouse.

Reason Four: Faulty and Selective Memories Are Less Common

Each data collection method has advantages and disadvantages. We advocate using multiple methods as a way to overcome the drawbacks of using a single methodology. Make no mistake: we all use interviews. Interviews are an extremely valuable method of inquiry in political science. As users of interviews, we have come to see their limitations and to see archival research as a way to improve upon the data that are gathered through personal interviews. One problem that we frequently encounter with interviews, however, is that memories fade. Members of Congress are extremely busy, and the details of decisions that were made months if not years before become blurry. In addition, members often have motivations